On a hot July morning, customers at Dollar General, along a two-lane highway northwest of Nashville, didn’t seem to notice the symptoms of the retail chain’s foray into cellular healthcare, especially in rural America.
One loaded a child into the back of a pickup truck and entered the store. A dog barked from a black pickup truck before its owner returned with boxes of soda. Another checked her hair in the rearview mirror of a convertible before going shopping.
Everyone walked past a sign that read “Quick and Easy Health Visits” with the symbol of a cell clinic.
Shortly after 10 a. m. , nurse Kimberly French arrived at the DocGo clinic cadres parked in the store’s parking lot. He checked his schedule.
“We don’t have an appointment yet, but that may change,” French said. “We didn’t have an appointment last night and 3 or 4 other people arrived at the same time. “
Dollar General, the nation’s largest store in terms of number of stores, with more than 19,000 stores, has partnered with New York-based cellular medical company DocGo to see if it can attract more consumers and fight persistent fitness inequities.
Implementing cellular clinics to fill care gaps in underserved spaces is a new idea. But combining them with Dollar General’s ubiquitous small-town presence has been hailed by investment analysts and some rural fitness experts as a way to mitigate the drought in physical care in rural America.
Dollar General’s latest annual report indicates that about 80 percent of the company’s retail stores are in cities with fewer than 20,000 residents, where medical professionals are scarce.
To serve those who need urgent care or primary care, cell clinics purchase personal insurance, as well as Medicaid and Medicare. The company says DocGo’s self-pay rates start at $69 for uninsured or out-of-network patients. DocGo officials said Tennessee patients may be charged other fees, but declined to provide details.
In Tennessee, top doctors and patients are skeptical.
“Honestly, they don’t understand, I don’t think, what they’re getting into,” said Brent Staton, a family physician and leader of the Cumberland Center for Health Innovation, a national organization that is helping young people in the U. S. The city’s family doctors coordinate care and negotiate with insurers, including Medicare.
Michelle Green runs the popular Sweet Charlotte Grill, about 16 miles south of Dollar General’s maximum rural control site. Green, who was handing out hand-cut burgers and fries to a crowd on Saturday, said he hadn’t heard of the cell clinic. He said with a shrugg that Dollar General and fitness clinics “don’t go together. “
“I wouldn’t need to go to a physical care clinic in a parking lot; it’s just me,” Green said, adding that maybe it will happen if “you’re physically bad and can’t move anywhere else. “
The Clarksville Area Pilot Project, introduced last fall, is in the federally designated number one care shortage scope for low-income residents.
About 1,000 patients have been seen at the company’s clinics, either at Dollar General’s sites or at pop-up network events, and some have regular visitors, according to DocGo. Payment is made outdoors using a cellular device, and once inside, patients meet with an on-site staff member, such as French, and connect via telehealth on an iPad screen with a medical assistant or nurse practitioner.
The clinic rotates weekly among 3 Dollar General pilots. The outlets are in the Clarksville area, and in early summer, the van stopped traveling to the rural area closest to Cumberland Furnace because of low usage, according to corporate executives. DocGo moved the time slot from this location to the busy Fort Campbell Boulevard in Clarksville.
“We’ve been for months in a domain to see where it makes sense and where it doesn’t,” Anthony Capone, former CEO of DocGo, said in an interview in July. “Our purpose is to align the source we have with the call of the local community. “
Capone, however, said he believes the pilot will work in rural spaces when insurers commit to referring their members to the cell clinic. DocGo recently announced a deal with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee.
Capone resigned on Sept. 15 after the Albany Times Union reported that he had lied about his graduate degree.
Dollar General’s retail stores have a “tremendous opportunity” to have “a primary effect on fitness there and really connect as a member of the community,” said Tom Campanella, director of physical care apartments at Wallace University, which controlled cellular services. . clinics in rural areas.
Near tiny Cumberland Furnace, south of Clarksville, William “Bubba” Murphy stopped as he walked to a Dollar General, stopped to greet and greet friends as they were getting them out of their car, and shared that several members of his family circle — his sister-in-law, nephew and his niece’s boyfriend — used and enjoyed “the little clinic on wheels. “
“We don’t want to go into the city and fight all this trafficking,” he said. “They come to us. It’s a glorious thing. It’s helping a lot of people. “
At busy Fort Campbell Boulevard in Clarksville, Marina Woolever, a mother of three, said she could use the clinic if she didn’t have insurance. Natural fitness professional Nichole Clemmer took a look at the clinic and called it a “plan” to earn more. money.
Corey Tarlowe, senior equity analyst at Jefferies, which tracks discount retailers, said the clinics will help “democratize” access to health care and increase traffic to Dollar General stores.
With its immediate expansion in recent years, Dollar General has been accused that its retail establishments are wiping out local grocery retailers and other businesses, cutting jobs and contributing to the creation of food deserts. More recently, the U. S. Department of Labor said the chain “continues to forget about the safety” of its employees, as it has racked up more than $21 million in federal fines.
Crystal Luce, senior director of public relations for Dollar General, said the company believes each new store brings “positive economic benefits,” adding new jobs, cheap products and a literacy base. Regarding federal fines, Luce said Dollar General is “committed to providing an artistic environment for our members and a food shopping experience for our customers. “The company refused to grant an interview.
The DocGo pilot project, he wrote, aims to “complement” DG Welfare’s initiative, which is a company-wide initiative. Dollar General needs to develop “access to fitness staples and ultimately over time, especially in rural America,” Luce wrote.
In the United States, DocGo is under fire over a no-bid contract to provide housing, public transportation and other services to asylum seekers in New York. State Attorney General Letitia James is investigating court cases filed through immigrants entrusted to the company. In August, DocGo officials said the claims made through resources in a New York Times article that first reported that the disruptions “did not reflect the overall breadth and quality” of supply through the company.
The company’s pilot allocation with Dollar General is “backed through investments from the state of Tennessee,” DocGo’s Capone said on the company’s first-quarter earnings call. The partnership with Dollar General is cited in quarterly grant reports that DocGo’s Rapid Reliable Testing LLC submitted to the state. , based on KFF Health News records received through public inquiries.
In the grant application, DocGo listed Dollar General and other organizations as “trusted messengers” for vaccine awareness.
Dollar General declined to answer about its participation in the grant. Instead, Luce said, “We continue to verify and be informed through the DocGo pilot. “
The purpose of the $2. 4 million grant, funded through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and distributed through the Tennessee Department of Health, is to administer COVID-19 vaccines. In a reaction written through DocGo’s chief marketing officer, Amanda Shell Jennings, the company said, “Dollar General does not participate in investments or appropriations from the Tennessee Department of Health. “
The grant covers the storage and maintenance of covid-19 vaccines at DocGo’s mobile clinics, Jennings said, adding that as of September, DocGo had conducted 41 vaccination events and provided 66 vaccines to citizens of rural Tennessee.
Lulu West, 72, visiting a friend at the Cumberland Furnace Iron History Museum when she stopped to read about the cell clinic. West said he would prefer to see his GP.
“When you talk about a mobile clinic outside of a Dollar General, it just has a connotation that you probably aren’t comfortable with. Do you know what I mean?” She.
That kind of reaction doesn’t surprise Carlo Pike, a doctor who has practiced family medicine for years in Clarksville. She said she’s not worried about the festival because providing primary care is about building relationships.
“If I can handle this dating properly,” Pike said, “maybe we can save you from having a blood sugar of 500 [mg/dL] or grandpa climbing a ladder and looking to fix something he has nothing to do with. “and fall and break his leg. “
Staton said the Cumberland Center for Healthcare Innovation, his care organization, has saved Medicare and Medicare Advantage corporations more than $100 million by focusing on preventive care and cutting patient hospitalizations and emergency visits.
“We’re just number one rural little doctors doing our homework with a procedure that works,” Staton said. In the interview, Staton referred to this as “relationship care. “
DocGo surveyed its patients and found that 19% of them hadn’t had a number one care doctor or hadn’t noticed theirs for over a year. In written responses provided through Jennings, DocGo stated that it follows up with each patient after the initial examination. visiting, providing telemedicine between visits, and providing ongoing preventive care on a normal schedule.
But despite its reach, DocGo has struggled to identify itself in rural Cumberland Furnace.
Lottie Stokes, president of the Cumberland Furnace Community Center, said the DocGo team had “called and asked to come here. “Stokes said he would prefer to call EMTs and firefighters, who he knows are “legitimate. “
His father-in-law, Bobby Stokes, who is just 80, said he used the cell clinic before moving.
His wife couldn’t breathe. They parked in the parking lot and loaded them into the van.
“We weren’t there for five minutes,” he said. They did the blood pressure test and what they had to do, put her in the car and said, ‘Take her to the hospital, to the emergency room. ‘”
DocGo staff, he said, asked for payment: “Nothing. “
“I guess they were more worried about her than getting her money,” he said, adding that his wife is doing it now. “They told me to go there and I took them at their word. My car drives fast. “
KFF Health News correspondent Brett Kelman contributed to this report.
This article was reprinted from khn. org, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on fitness issues and is one of KFF’s primary operating systems, the independent source for fitness policy research, surveys and journalism.
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